Yetide Badaki is a Nigerian-born actress known for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and American Gods, as well as appearances on Lost, Touch, Criminal Minds, Masters of Sex, and This Is Us. As a theater actress in Chicago, Badaki won acclaim for her performances at the Victory Gardens Theater and Steppenwolf. She won Best Actress for her role in the film Precipice at the Indie Short Fest. Badaki can currently be seen in Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. Her film credits include RISE, Cardinal X, A Chance of Rain, What We Found, and Run Fast. Badaki co-wrote, produced, and starred in the short In Hollywoodland.

Edward P. Jones is the author of two story collections, All Aunt Hagar’s Children and Lost in the City, which was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lannan Literary Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His novel The Known World won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The International Dublin Literary Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a PEN/Malamud Award for the excellence in the art of the short story. Jones is a professor of English at George Washington University.

When you think of Sonia Manzano, you immediately think of children and television. Her most recent accomplishment was creating a children’s program, Alma’s Way, for PBS Kids. The series has won two Imagen Awards for Best Youth Programing, a 2022 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program, and a 2023 NAACP nomination for an Image Award. But what Ms. Manzano is best known for performing the role of Maria on Sesame Street for 44 seasons, where her work affected the lives of millions of parents and children and garnered her two Emmy Award nominations in addition to the National Academy of Arts and Science’s Lifetime Achievement Daytime Emmy in 2016. As a writer for the show, she took home 15 Emmys. In 2022, Manzano was honored with the Beacon Award from PBS. She is also an author whose most recent Scholastic novel, Coming Up Cuban, set in 1959, follows the lives of four children who represent different intersections of race and class during the Cuban Revolution.

Jenny Minton Quigley is the series editor for The Best Short Stories of The Year: The O. Henry Prize Winners and the author of the memoir The Early Birds. She is the daughter of Walter J. Minton, the storied former president and publisher of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, who first dared to publish Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov in the United States in 1958. Quigley is a former book editor at several Random House imprints.

Morgan Spector is best known for the role of George Russel on The Gilded Age. On Broadway, he has been featured in A View from the Bridge, Harvey, Machinal, and Fallen Angels, and Off-Broadway with the Rattlestick Theater, the Acorn Theatre, and the Atlantic Theater Company, among many others. Spector’s additional screen credits include Homeland, The Plot Against America, Boardwalk Empire, Christine, A Vigilante, Boston Strangler, Pearson, and I Don’t Understand You. He can currently be seen in the limited series Black Rabbit; upcoming projects include the film Caity.

Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator, working mainly in the areas of Latin American fiction, essays, poetry, and hybrid texts. She has translated works by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, Karla Suárez, and Elvira Navarro. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published shorter translations, articles, interviews, and collaborations on a wide variety of platforms. Her most recent translations are Jazmina Barrera’s Cross Stitch and Clyo Mendoza’s Fury. In 2024, she was granted a Sundial House Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s The Company.

Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of Mercury Pictures Presents, The Tsar of Love and Techno, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Daniel Saldaña París is the author of Ramifications, Planes Flying over a Monster, and The Dance and the Fire. He was a 2022–23 Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, an Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award winner in 2020, and a finalist for the Herralde Prize in 2021. He currently splits his time between Mexico City and New York.

Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. Her novels include On Black Sisters Street and The Middle Daughter. She shuttles between Atlanta, Georgia, and Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is a professor of creative writing at Georgia College. Widely translated, Unigwe has won numerous awards for her writing.